I just turned 49. Yes, it’s a big one! A square birthday, seven lots of seven years. My last square birthday was when I turned 36 in 2012, and my next one will arrive (cross fingers) in 2040.
A square birthday is a great opportunity to take stock. How has my life worked out across those seven even pieces of seven years?
0-6: I was born and learned to be human. I lived a life of immense privilege, which is to say, i was surrounded by happy and kind family, economically secure and untouched by major trauma or instability; many do not have such luck in the lottery of birth.
7-13: I found a path. My creative energies and cultural interests fired up and fixed on the things that occupy me to this day: narratives and interactivity, writing and gameplay, performance and emotion.
14-20: I became, properly, me. My sense of self clicked into place after a few years of determined self-interrogation. I fell in love a bit, and thought hard about what that meant. I developed a metaphysics about my own identity and what it is to live in the world. I started being creatively ambitious and saw that I could be a leader when I wanted.
21-27: I started making some bigger moves, with creative projects, with community efforts, with my own life. Went to the other side of the world, to see just how big it was. Met the love of my life in this chunk of time, too.
28-34: Deconstructed all of it. Went back to first principles. Came home transformed. Followed the possibilities I came across. Returned to academia to pursue an insight that was uniquely mine, wrote a novel that pushed me to the limit, started seeking work in those narrow areas for which I was uniquely suited. None of it came to anything, of course, but it was rewarding nonetheless. Then got civil unioned, and became a parent, which immediately overshadowed all else.
35-41: Everything outside fell away around being a Dad for a young child. Unprecedented sensation that i was in the right place doing the right thing whenever I was with them. Also, dog!
42-now: Dad for an older child, against a world of rapidly increasing upset and chaos. Being a stable force against instability occupied my thoughts and emotions. Also did some of the best creative work of my life. However, I was holding too much, and by the end of this time I began to break. It humbled me.
What is coming next? I really don’t know. “Dad” means a different thing nowadays. The world is getting more unstable, not less. And we have two dogs. But it’s good to cast an eye back over this, and see each block being laid that together give me now a place to stand.
I’m just going to try and look after people, and make some interesting things, and breathe deep and sure and calm.